Jabali Sawicki stands on a summit
during his 1993 NOLS Alaska Backpacking course, an
experience he now shares with his students at an all-boys
school in Brooklyn.

The poet Henry David
Thoreau once called summer the “interval between
hope and fulfillment.” Through
a program called Summer Search, a select group of
low-income high school students get to experience
this fulfillment at NOLS when the stretched-out days
of summer arrive.

Summer Search sends about 600 students each summer
on adventures designed to foster leadership. Of these,
more than a dozen attend a NOLS course while school
is out. Summer Search picks students for NOLS courses
who have demonstrated resiliency in overcoming hardships
in their lives…lives that are far-removed
from a NOLS experience.

Lawrence "Omar" Phillips took a North Cascades
backpacking course in 2001 through Summer Search
Boston. Omar is currently a sophomore at Georgia
Tech.

Former NOLS Instructor Jay Jacobs is Summer Search’s
executive director and says that NOLS is part of
the summer learning program because it teaches students
to put their troubled lives back in their own hands. “At
NOLS,” Jacobs says, “it’s on you
to do it—if you don’t pack your pack
right, your stuff will blow away. Our kids live in
environments where what happens is out of their control.
But NOLS teaches that you have tremendous personal
mastery and the ability to manage your own situation.”

Jabali Sawicki, who took an Alaska Backpacking course
in 1993 as part of Summer Search, remembers this
lesson well. “When I was on top of the world,
exhausted, hungry and proud, I realized that I had
accomplished the impossible,” he remembers
of the course. “All other struggles, obstacles
and challenges paled in comparison. The streets I
grew up on, the skeptics, poverty and race, everything
that stood between me and my success could be scaled
like the frozen peaks of Alaska.”

Sawicki, now 27, runs a charter school for African
American boys in New York City. And his success is
not unusual. From high-powered investors, to lawyers
and Harvard graduates, NOLS-Summer Search students
reach some impressive heights. Jacobs, who runs Summer
Search offices in San Francisco, Boston, Napa-Sonoma,
New York City, and Seattle, believes NOLS gives inner-city
kids some common ground in the cutthroat business
world. He likes the story of NOLS-Summer Search grad
Mohammed Bey, who applied for a highly competitive
internship while at Georgetown Law School. During
the process, an interviewer looked at his resume
and her eyes lit up when she saw NOLS: “I’m
a NOLS graduate!” she said. Jacobs believes
she knew right away the leadership skills Bey would
bring to the internship—and that probably helped
him get it.

Jacobs also has fun listening to the stories of
recent NOLS graduates when they return from the wilderness. “It’s
so fun when students come back to see these inner
city kids talking about technical climbing skills,” he
says. “I always think the NOLS experience has
got to be one of the most unheard-of things to happen
in their neighborhoods.”

Back in Brooklyn, Sawicki knows that many of his
students will never see the kind of wild he saw in
Alaska. But that’s okay, because he can always
talk about it. He talks about things like courage,
perseverance, scholarship, responsibility and teamwork.
Most of all, he tries to explain to them what accomplishment
feels like.

“When you are standing on the top of a mountain
in Alaska overlooking the valley below, your perspective
changes,” Sawicki says. “How you view
yourself in relation to the world is forever altered.
All my teenage worries, fears and anxieties were
so far away and so small compared to the mountains.
So many people said I would never be successful with
my life, but there I was close to the sun, muscles
aching, yodeling on a mountaintop ready to return
to my life and continue climbing.”

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